The man was never identified. His remains were found on July 24, 1974, on a dirt road near Upland, in Dickinson County, Kansas, by a man who had come home to visit his parents. He was white, probably between twenty-five and thirty-one, and he had been shot. Cecil Henry Floyd later gave an account of it: he had picked the man up hitchhiking somewhere in western Kansas, driven for several hours, and pulled onto the dirt road saying he needed to fix a rear tire. When the man got out to help, Floyd said, he shot him several times, took the cash from his wallet and threw the wallet away. The victim was buried in the Abilene Cemetery as the Dickinson County John Doe. The sheriff's office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation exhumed him in October 2016 to try to put a name to him, and as of January 2025 they still had not.
On the day the body was found, Floyd was already in custody. Sheriff's deputies caught him and his wife near Lonoke, Arkansas, on July 24, after an FBI agent tipped them off; he had robbed a gas station in Lonoke. Three children were in the car, two from his wife's earlier marriage and one the couple's own, and all three were taken into child protective services. The FBI had issued a federal warrant a week earlier, on July 17, charging him with kidnapping Harold Warren McQuinney, eighteen, from Micanopy, Florida, on June 30. McQuinney had been held for a day before he got away in Jasper, Tennessee, and went to the authorities.
Floyd was born in Indianapolis in 1945, the only child of Cecil Moses Floyd and Sarah Pearl Farlow. His first known trouble with the law came in 1959, a $55 fine for careless driving and driving without a license. In 1971 he married Lorna Jean Kern, who was twenty-three. She later said they had met at a motel in Macon, Georgia, and that she married him because he threatened to hurt her children. She described a man paranoid about being arrested, who washed the children's mouths out with soap, put hot peppers in their mouths, and punched them until their noses bled.
The first killing came on July 23, 1973, near the Boone County Fair at Lebanon, Indiana. Floyd was traveling with two other people. Henry Michael Maser, fifteen, had come to the fair with a sixteen-year-old friend, Frank Clark, and had wandered off after the two of them stopped at a ball-toss booth. Floyd shot him three times in the head and took his wallet, which held five dollars. The boy's body lay in underbrush for six days before it was found. The first suspect was a carnival worker, Robert Stewart, arrested in Jonesboro, Georgia, for stealing a car from a motel near the fairgrounds. Stewart said he had nothing to do with the boy's death, told police a young blond man had been with him on the car theft, and passed a polygraph. The murder charge against him was dropped.
On November 14, 1973, Floyd and Thomas Mattingly, thirty-six, broke into the Durands Motel in Union Park, Florida, to rob the owners, Barney M. Rycyk, fifty-six, and his brother Stanley. The brothers had bought the motel that March with their life savings and had already been robbed once, of $100. This time Barney was beaten with a claw hammer sixty-six times and stuffed into the office bathroom, and the robbers took twenty dollars. As they were leaving, Stanley came back from shopping and asked what they were doing. One of them said his brother had been showing them a room. Stanley offered to show them one himself once he had checked with Barney, and the two men followed him halfway down the corridor, then ran for their car. Stanley found his brother's body, and he had seen enough of the license plate to give deputies a number only two digits off from that of a car with Indiana plates that had bought gas with a card at a nearby station.
On February 20, 1974, James Chitwood came home to his apartment in Orlando and found his wife, Karen, seventeen, dead on the floor. She had been bound and gagged, her skull had been crushed, and she had been stabbed four times in the chest with a butcher knife. She had not been sexually assaulted. A 10-inch General Electric television and a clock radio were missing, and police treated it as a robbery, but the case went cold.
Leslie Johnston, twenty-two, a medical technician student, was reported missing in Orlando on May 11, 1974. She was found a week later in heavy woods, shot three times in the upper body. After his arrest Floyd said he had been trying to tie her up with a pink ribbon when she broke free, grabbed his pistol and fired at him, and that he shot her after wrestling it back. On June 30, the day of the McQuinney kidnapping, a twenty-three-year-old woman in Orlando was raped and locked in the trunk of a car; Floyd later confessed to that as well.
On July 13, 1974, Nebraska State Trooper Paul Harding pulled into a Phillips 66 station near Aurora to fill his car and noticed that no one came out. Inside he heard a gurgling sound from the bathroom. The attendant, Lester Schmidt, twenty-four, was lying in a pool of blood with three gunshot wounds. Harding turned him on his side to drain the blood and called an ambulance, and Schmidt died at Aurora Memorial Hospital without regaining consciousness. The cash register was gone, along with $500. A search with a police helicopter turned up nothing.
Held without bond in Arkansas on the armed robbery, the Floyds were linked to the Schmidt killing, and the prosecuting attorney, Samuel Weems, agreed to waive extradition proceedings so they could be tried in Nebraska. Investigators from Indiana, Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri were looking at them. On July 29, Lorna Floyd was taken to Orlando to be held as a material witness in three of the killings, and the same day Florida deputies went to collect Thomas Mattingly to face a first-degree murder charge for Barney Rycyk. Lorna told detectives she had been an unwilling accomplice, that she had not been there for the Chitwood and Rycyk killings, and that she "knew about them." Floyd confessed to six of the murders he was accused of and to the Orlando rape. He later claimed eleven killings in all; the rest were never verified. In February 1975, the Dickinson County Attorney, Steve Opat, charged him with the hitchhiker's murder.
He was arraigned in Orlando in August 1974 on murder and false imprisonment charges and pleaded guilty to all of them in January 1975, with sentencing put off so the other states could try him. On March 5 he waived extradition to Indiana. That month a Florida jury convicted Mattingly of the Rycyk murder but recommended life rather than death; he and his lawyer maintained that Floyd alone had done the killing. In May 1975, Floyd was convicted of murdering Lester Schmidt and given life, and he was sent to the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City. He was later convicted of Henry Maser's murder and given a second life term. Kansas decided not to sentence a man already serving several life terms, and closed its case.
In 1998, more than twenty-four years after the Orlando pleas, Florida prosecutors moved to bring him back and seek the death penalty. They could, because under Florida law at the time a guilty plea left him eligible for death and he had never been sentenced. Whether he was ever taken to Florida is unknown. A spokesman for the Indiana Department of Correction said he died of natural causes at the prison in Michigan City on June 17, 2011. He was sixty-six.